Topic: Motorola

While Google's plans to set up a music service have been rumored for years, Motorola's chief executive Sanjay Jha slipped in describing the service as if it were already available, in a conversation promoting his company's new Xoom tablet.

The growth of Apple's iPhone in 2010 came at the expense of competitors who lost significant market share and experienced reduced sales, including Sony Ericsson and Motorola, according to new data from Gartner.

After posting an ad teaser and a series of web banner ads promoting its new tablet, Motorola presented its entire full length Super Bowl spot for the Xoom tablet, packed with references to Apple in a bid to court iPad users.

After passing Apple's iPhone on its way up, Google's Android has now passed up Nokia's Symbian to take the top spot among smartphone platforms, ending Nokia's 10 year reign on top of the global smartphone industry, according to one research firm.

Enterprise mobile services vendor Good Technology reported a 64 percent increase in the iPad's share of all device activations over the past quarter among its more than 2,000 companies deploying mobile devices. The jump extended Apple's iOS lead over Android, with more than twice as many device activations over all of 2010.

A report out of the Far East claims volume production of Research in Motion's BlackBerry PlayBook tablet will reach 1 million shipments in the first quarter of 2011, while Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales criticized Apple's App Store as "very dangerous" and a threat to Internet freedom. Finally, more evidence that cameras are coming to Apple's second-generation iPad has been discovered in the iOS 4.3 beta.

Two analysts monitoring the tablet extravaganza at CES have issued reports indicating that euphoria about new tablets outside of Apple's iPad may fall short of expectations because those products lack the iPad's extensive App Store software library and access to the wide range of media in the "digital ecosystem" of iTunes.

During a press event Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show, the newly spun off Motorola Mobility officially unveiled a challenger to the iPad in the form of its Xoom tablet, which will be the first to run Google Android 3.0 Honeycomb, and showed off new competition for the iPhone in the form of the Atrix 4G Android-based smartphone.

Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen's lawsuit against Apple and 10 other major tech companies hit a snag Friday when a judge dismissed the complaint for being too vague in its allegations. Allen has until Dec. 28 to file an amended complaint.

Just over a year ago, Research in Motion's BlackBerry made up more than 90 percent of Verizon's smartphone sales. Its share is now below 20 percent, thanks to the heavily promoted launch of Android smartphones on the carrier.

Apple has amended its lawsuit against Motorola to include 12 more patents, bringing the total count of patents that Apple accuses Motorola of violating to 24, while Motorola alleges that Apple has infringed on 18 of its patents.